


his darkest hour, just before the dawn

by HereComeDatBoi



Series: you're the one that's making me strong [25]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam (Voltron) is a Good Husband, Angst with a Happy Ending, Black Paladin Shiro (Voltron), But also, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Married Adam/Shiro (Voltron), don't ask how, it's both
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21615283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: “I’ll come back to you, Adam. I promise.”"I know,” Shiro whispered, dark eyes glinting with terror and pride as he threw his arms around Shiro’s waist. “Go, ‘Kashi. Try to keep the others out of trouble, and call as soon as you’re all clear, okay?”“Not a second later,” he swore. “We’ll be just fine, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”Adam choked out a laugh that sounded more like a sob, shaking his head against Shiro’s chest and squeezing him even tighter. “Damn it, Takashi. How can you—oh, never mind. Don’t you dare get yourself killed out there, you hear? You’re still just a man, even with your fancy arm and a bunch of magic robots, so for the love of God don’t—”“Tell me off when I get home, honey. Because I will be coming home. I mean it.”---Wars don't always end with a ceasefire.Shiro learns this the hard way.
Relationships: Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Pidge | Katie Holt & Shiro
Series: you're the one that's making me strong [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1261916
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18





	his darkest hour, just before the dawn

_ “I’ll come back to you, Adam. I promise.” _

_ “I know,” Adam whispered, dark eyes glinting with terror and pride as he threw his arms around Shiro’s waist. “Go, ‘Kashi. Try to keep the others out of trouble, and call as soon as you’re all clear, okay?” _

_ “Not a second later,” he swore. “We’ll be just fine, sweetheart. Don’t worry.” _

_ Adam choked out a laugh that sounded more like a sob, shaking his head against Shiro’s chest and squeezing him even tighter. “Damn it, Takashi. How can you—oh, never mind. Don’t you dare get yourself killed out there, you hear? You’re still just a man, even with your fancy arm and a bunch of magic robots, so for the love of  _ God  _ don’t—” _

_ “Finish it when I get home,” Shiro murmured, cutting him off with a salty kiss and wiping the tears off his face. “Because I will be coming home. I mean it.” _

_ * _ _ _ _ * _ _ _ _ * _

The others urged him to stay on Arus after the Langdian system was freed—just for an hour’s rest in the healing pods, Hunk said—but Shiro hugged them all fervently and shook his head, handing his bayard back to Keith and climbing into Green’s mouth after Pidge. He ached all over, both from close to three hours of crouching in the smooth stone tunnels crisscrossing under the Helithian capital and then being thrown around Black’s cockpit until he almost concussed himself on the control panel, and as Pidge flew them back towards the boundaries of their own spiral galaxy Shiro thought again of Keith howling at the top of his lungs after Lance, begging him to leave the oddly  _ easily  _ downed Gotcean warper alone, and then Lance’s cries when he realized  _ too late  _ what the shapeshifting predators had left for him inside—

“Shiro? You okay?”

“Sorry,” he murmured, blearily watching Green dodge what looked like an ice field before her particle barriers went up. “What is it?”

“You look like death,” she said flatly, activating one of the autopilot settings and turning around to stare at him. “Lance just almost got eaten alive, and he looked better than on the inside of a healing pod than you do now.”

Shiro shook his head. “I’m fine, Katie. Eyes on the road, please.”

“I’m not buying that, buckaroo. And in case you didn’t notice, my hands weren’t on the controls in the first place ‘cause Green’s on autopilot.”

“ _ Hush _ . You’ve been spending too much time with your brother, you know that?”

“Matt’s been spending too much time with me,” Pidge sniffed. “He thinks he can bring his son up in my lab and that I’ll just allow it. I don’t have a clue how Mishaal puts up with him, really.”

“The same way Adam and I did in school, probably. With love and a whole lot of confusion.”

“Yeah, probably.”

She studied him for a moment longer, and then—

“Were you, uh...did anything happen down there?”

_ Lance was going to die _ .  _ He was screaming, and Keith was screaming, and the blood.... _

The blood was the worst part, he thought dimly. It had spilled all over the floor of Blue’s cockpit, from the deep jagged tooth-marks in Lance’s legs and the ones covering his shoulder—and Blue had been able to  _ smell  _ it, so certain that she was going to lose a paladin for the second time since Blaytz was murdered in front of her over ten thousand years ago that the other four lions flew to her aid without being directed by their pilots. Lance was nowhere near Shiro when Black knocked Keith and Hunk out of the way and lured the Gotceans down into the Greater Langdian ocean—but the sweet-iron scent of his blood was thick in Shiro’s nostrils, and as Black overpowered its quintessence core and reached into  _ his  _ for power all he could think was that it was  _ all his fault— _

“...Shiro?”

_ Oh God, those Gotcean beasts were going to eat Lance alive. _

_ “Shiro!”  _ Someone slapped his chest, and he lifted his eyelids through a bleary kind of haze to find Pidge gripping his armor by the bloodstained neck-plate. “ _ Don’t fall asleep! _ Hunk says you could have a concussion, so don’t—”

“What? No, of course I don’t. I was just thinking about the mission, that’s all, and wondering if Lance is going to be okay.”

“He was crying over the fact that Langdians can’t eat chocolate when we left, so I think he’s going to be fine,” Pidge said dryly. “Did you tell Adam we’re coming back? And my mom?”

Shiro nodded. “Sent off a message when we got Lance into the pod.”

“Did they answer?”

“Mm-hm.”

There was probably a reason the five of them never really talked after missions back in the war days, he realized. They would rest for an hour, or maybe two, and only then would there be a debriefing; it felt as if their trauma would only weaken them more when they spoke about it, or else make everything  _ real  _ somehow and drive home the fact that they were  _ soldiers _ millions of light years away from Earth—not even Keith could have tolerated thinking about that for long, Shiro knew.

_ “Lance!”  _ he heard his brother cry out again, somewhere in the shadowy corner of his mind where his memories of Zarkon’s gladiator ring used to live before the Atlas purged them all from him.  _ “Lance, don’t, please don’t—” _

“I’m going to sleep for a bit,” Shiro said aloud, clambering out of his chair and heading back towards Green’s cargo hold. “Wake me up if you need anything, okay? I don’t care what, just come get me.”

Pidge’s eyes softened. 

“Yeah, I will. Don’t worry about it.”

Green entered the solar system an hour later, activating the cloaking shield when Charon and Pluto came into sight and passing the five remaining plants without leaving a trace on any of the scanners at the Titan colony—or the one on Mars, which flashed by less than a minute before they hit Earth’s atmosphere—and then they were pulling into Hangar Y at the Garrison, where all five of the lions were docked whenever they were planetside. 

“Captain Shirogane, sir,” one of the younger privates called, jogging towards Shiro and Pidge as they climbed out of Green’s mouth with their mission kits hanging over their shoulders. “Lieutenant Holt, Commander Iverson would like to call a debriefing, if there’s—”

“There’s no threat to us, Private Griffin,” Pidge said wearily, stamping on Shiro’s foot before he could open his mouth and call the poor boy by his older brother’s name for the fourth or fifth time that month. “We’ve taken care of it. And either way, the adversaries come from a species that can’t travel via wormhole at all, so there’ll be time for a debriefing tomorrow morning. Can you tell Iverson and the Admiral that, please?”

“Right away, ma’am,” squeaked the private, saluting them both before taking two steps backward. “Is there anything else I should—”

“Stop calling me ma’am, for one. I’m only twenty and you’re—what, eighteen? Seven years younger than James, right?”

Griffin nodded. “Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Well, Kelly, that’ll be all. Now buzz off, you should’ve been in bed hours ago.”

Shiro could almost see the boy struggling with a retort of some kind—self-importance was one trait the brothers Griffin had in common, after all—but the desire to make a good impression won out in the end, and he bobbed off another hasty salute and vanished back down the hallway leading to the next building before Pidge had time to say another word.

“Are you going home tonight?” she wondered at last, clipping the straps of her backpack around her waist. “I can take you, you’re in no fit state to be flying.”

“I’ll go in one of the training fighters,” Shiro said gently, giving her a soft push towards the door. “Those have autopilot too, you know. And Adam’s waiting up for me, anyway.”

The mention of Adam seemed to do the trick, since Pidge seemed to have remembered that her own family—increased by two since Matt’s marriage to Mishaal and the birth of their son six months ago—was waiting in her brother’s apartment, with her elderly dog and fussy baby nephew included. 

“Text me when you get there, then!” she shouted, throwing open the door and running off in the wake of Kelly Griffin’s dying footsteps. “Bye!”

“Get home safe!” he called after her.

_ Please, please get home safe. _

* * *

It was past five o’clock in the morning when his fighter finally came down on a bare patch of ground behind the little bungalow Adam’s father had given them, and still so dark that he turned on the flashlight on his backpack to make his way back to the house. The downstairs windows were locked and bolted, looking like empty grey eyes in the shadows as he hurried down the gravel path leading to the front porch—which was lit from top to bottom by a string of hanging festival lanterns, made out of red and orange paper like the origami half-moons Sonia had folded for her last art project at school. 

There was someone sleeping on the swing beneath them, a long lanky someone with a mobile phone lying under his open hand, with its cracked screen (courtesy of Matt and Sonia) frozen on what looked like a chat history as Shiro picked his husband up and carried him over the threshold, walking in the grips of the same heavy daze that had taken him over when he and Black fell into the Langdian sea nearly seven hours ago.

_ I’m home _ , Shiro whispered to himself, shifting Adam’s warm weight in his arms before laying him down on the sofa.  _ And they’re still here, all of them. They’re okay. _

“Takashi?” mumbled Adam, blinking awake and pushing a lock of stray hair out of his eyes. “Oh, thank God, thank  _ God  _ you’re safe _ — _ ”

Shiro nodded jerkily and slumped down at Adam’s side, burying his face in his husband’s stomach with a strangled cry before bursting into tears. Fighting would never be the same again, he realized—he had nothing to lose during the war, what with his illness hanging over his head like a timer on double speed—nothing to lose and everything to gain, and now that desperate, desolate fact that carried him through mission after mission in his twenties was no longer a fact at all. He had everything to lose now, a universe Adam had given his life to protect and a hard-won peace after endless years of pain, not to mention a husband and a child and a second baby on the way. And then there were the other five paladins—Keith and Lance had their two little boys, and Hunk and Pidge had their families, and  _ Allura— _

“Everything went wrong, and it was my fault,” he sobbed, reaching for Adam’s shoulders and grasping them so tightly that his knuckles went pale. “Adam, I—I couldn’t protect  _ any  _ of them in the end, and I—I was only  _ there  _ in the first place because they needed me in Black. There was a fighter over one of the planets near Arus, Hunk and Keith shot it down—and Lance, h-he went to see what was in it, but it was a trap, they  _ knew! _ ”

“Takashi,  _ makhnaa,  _ he’s alive and okay. I know because Keith just texted me. Breathe, love, please,” Adam begged, hugging him close and making soothing noises in his ears. “He’s okay, he’s fine. Just take a deep breath, janu.”

“I couldn’t even keep  _ Allura  _ out of it.” The tears were coming faster now, snaking over the cuts on his cheeks and soaking into Adam’s brown sweater as he fought to keep back a scream. “I was only there for her, to keep her out of Blue, and she had to—oh God, if anything had happened to her or to Lance it would have been  _ my  _ fault. It was me,  _ I _ decided to go after that ship in the first place, and I couldn’t make Lance stay back because I thought it was important before—so when they got him she had to take over, and I’m alive because of her— _ you’re  _ alive because of her, we have Sonia and Hime-chan because  _ she  _ made it possible and I couldn’t even keep her and her baby safe, oh  _ God...” _

“Takashi,  _ listen to me! _ ” shouted Adam, clapping his hands onto either side of Shiro’s head and squeezing it like a vice until he managed to catch his breath. “It wasn’t your fault. It  _ wasn’t _ . That fighter had to go down, half the system would have been destroyed if you hadn’t taken care of it! And it isn’t your fault Lance didn’t listen to you, he—he’s always been headstrong, you know that, and of course Allura had to pilot Blue after he was wounded. There was no other way,  _ none _ .  _ I’d  _ have done it if I were in her place, even with Himeko.”

_ “Over my dead body!”  _ Shiro howled. “You swore you were finished, you promised—you’re not going back there, Adam, you  _ can’t!  _ You told me you were leaving them for good, you said you’d stay— _ ” _

“Oh, sweetheart, no,” whispered his husband, pulling him close and pressing their foreheads together. He took Shiro’s hands and laid them over the titanium-scaultrite siphon anchored into his chest, kissing every inch of pale clammy skin he could reach as Shiro’s sobs began to quiet. “No, I’m not leaving you. You have me, darling, I’m not going anywhere. Not back to Ahmedabad, not back to the Atlas. I’m staying here with you and Sonia, okay? I  _ did  _ promise, and I meant it. Don’t cry, darling, I’m here. I’m here. For better or worse and for richer or poorer, remember? I’m  _ yours. _ ”

“Promise?” he wept. “Say you promise.  _ Please _ .”

“For all the rest of my  _ life, jaan-e-jaan.  _ For all the days I’ve got left, and after. For the next ten thousand lifetimes, if I get them.”

A pause, and then:

“Do you think you can come to bed now, ‘Kashi?”

“Um…”

“We don’t have to if you’re not ready yet,. No rush.”

“...No, I want to. Can you help me up, maybe? I don’t think I can stand on my own right now.”

“ _ Always,  _ my moonlight. I’ve got you, I promise. Come on.”


End file.
